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The time I yelled in the confessional

At aleteia.com Elizabeth Scalia recalled the “strangest Confession of my life” – where she and her confessor both started yelling. “It got loud,” she wrote. “If people were waiting, I was pretty sure they could hear us hollering through the thick wooden doors.”

She had been in “one of those funks” that had made her feel both rebellious and hopeless. She had missed a holy day of obligation and then a Sunday Mass. But when she was finally able to go to Confession, she said, “I was surprised to encounter a priest who wondered why I was bothering him with it”.

He asked her why she had been refraining from Communion and she “sputtered in some amazement: ‘You’re asking me? You don’t know the answer?’” He argued that there was no malice in her missing Mass, and she disagreed. “There was malice and forethought, and my formation is good enough to know that malice and forethought is an excellent reason for me to be here,” she said.

The row yielded a breakthrough, though. “All of my bad behaviour had been rooted in a grave sin of envy, yet I hadn’t been cognisant of it, or even planning to confess envy.”

The priest was triumphant, Scalia wrote. “Picking fights with a penitent – that’s one way to get to the truth.”

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